Pringles

This article is about the brand of potato snacks. For the city in Argentina, see Coronel Pringles. For other uses, see Pringles (disambiguation).

Pringles

File:Pringles.svg 2009-Present Logo
A pile of Pringles chips
Product type	Potato snack
Owner	Kellogg Company (since 2012)
Country	United States
Introduced	1967 (1967)
Markets	Worldwide
Previous owners	Procter & Gamble (1967-2012)
Website	www.pringles.com

Details
Type	Snack food
Main ingredient(s)	Potato
Variations	Various regular and promotional flavors

Pringles is a brand of potato and wheat based stackable snack chips owned by the Kellogg Company.

Originally marketed as "Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips", Pringles are sold in more than 140 countries, and have yearly sales of more than US$1.4 billion.

They were originally developed by Procter & Gamble (P&G), who first sold the product in 1967. P&G sold the brand to Kellogg in 2012.

History

Pringles were first sold in 1967, have been distributed nationwide since 1975, and were introduced overseas in 1991. P&G wanted to create a perfect chip to address consumer complaints about broken, greasy, and stale chips, as well as air in the bags. The task was assigned to chemist Fredric Baur, who, from 1956 to 1958, created Pringles’ saddle shape from fried dough, and the can to go with it. Baur could not figure out how to make the chips taste good and he eventually was pulled off the Pringles job to work on another brand. In the mid-1960s, another P&G researcher, Alexander Liepa of Montgomery, Ohio, restarted Baur’s work, and set out to improve on the Pringles taste, which he succeeded in doing. While Baur was the true inventor of the Pringles chip, Liepa's name is on the patent. Gene Wolfe, a mechanical engineer-author known for science fiction and fantasy novels, developed the machine that cooks them. Their consistent saddle shape is mathematically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid. Their design is reportedly aided by supercomputers to ensure safe aerodynamics while packaging.

There are several theories behind the origin of the name "Pringles". One theory refers to Mark Pringle, who filed a US Patent 2,286,644 titled "Method and Apparatus for Processing Potatoes" on 5 March 1937. Pringle's work was cited by Procter & Gamble (P&G) in filing their own patent for improving the taste of dehydrated processed potatoes. Another theory suggested two Procter advertising employees lived on Pringle Drive in Finneytown (north of Cincinnati, Ohio), and the name paired well with potato. Another theory says that P&G chose the Pringles name from a Cincinnati telephone book.

They were originally known as "Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips", but other snack manufacturers objected, saying Pringles failed to meet the definition of a potato "chip". The US Food and Drug Administration weighed in on the matter, and in 1975, they ruled Pringles could only use the word "chip" in their product name within the following phrase: "potato chips made from dried potatoes". Faced with such an unpalatable appellation, Pringles eventually opted to rename their product potato "crisps" instead of chips. This later led to other issues in the United Kingdom, where the term potato "crisps" refers to the product Americans call potato "chips".

In April 2011, P&G agreed to the $2.35 billion sale of the brand to Diamond Foods of California, a deal which would have more than tripled the size of Diamond's snack business. However, the deal fell through in February 2012 after a year-long delay due to issues over Diamond's accounts. On 31 May 2012, Kellogg Company officially acquired Pringles for $2.695 billion as part of a plan to grow its international snacks business. The acquisition of Pringles makes Kellogg the second-largest savory snacks company in the world.

Pringles are manufactured in factories in Jackson, Tennessee; Mechelen, Belgium; Johor, Malaysia; Kutno, Poland; Fujian, China.

Ingredients

Pringles have about 42% potato content, the remainder being wheat starch and flours (potato, corn, and rice) combined with vegetable oils, an emulsifier, salt, and seasoning. Other ingredients can include sweeteners like maltodextrin and dextrose, monosodium glutamate (MSG), disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, sodium caseinate, modified food starch, monoglyceride and diglyceride, autolyzed yeast extract, natural and artificial flavors, malted barley flour, wheat bran, dried black beans, sour cream, cheddar cheese, etc.; Pringles varieties vary in their ingredients.

In July 2008 in the London High Court, P&G lawyers successfully argued that Pringles were not crisps (even though labelled "Potato Crisps" on the container) as the potato content was only 42% and their shape, P&G stated, "is not found in nature". This ruling, against a United Kingdom VAT and Duties Tribunal decision to the contrary, exempted Pringles from the then 17.5% VAT for potato crisps and potato-derived snacks. In May 2009, the Court of Appeal reversed the earlier decision. A spokesman for P&G stated it had been paying the VAT proactively and owed no back taxes.

Flavors

Pringles come in many flavors. Standard flavors include original, salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion, cheddar cheese, ranch dressing, barbecue, hot and spicy, and loaded baked potato. Some flavors are distributed only to limited market areas. For example, prawn cocktail, wasabi, and curry flavors have been available in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Occasionally, P&G produced limited edition runs. Seasonal flavors, past and present, include ketchup, zesty lime and chili, chili cheese dog, "pizzalicious", paprika, Texas BBQ sauce, buffalo wing, and cajun. A "low-fat" variety was also sold. Examples of limited edition flavors include jalapeño, honey mustard, cheesy fries, onion blossom, mozzarella cheese stick, screamin' dill pickle, and Mexican-layered dip. At one point in the early 1990s, "Corn Pringles" were available. The canister was black and had cartoon images of corn, as well as the normal packaging standards. The crisps were made of corn and resembled a corn chip in flavor and texture.

In 2012, they brought out seasonal flavors of "peppermint white chocolate", cinnamon sugar, and "pumpkin pie spice".

Pringles also produces several "multi-grain" varieties which have some of their base starch ingredients replaced with corn flour, rice, wheat bran, black beans, and barley flour.

Pringles has offered specialized flavors in various parts of the world, such as mozzarella stick with marinara in North America and jalapeño in Latin America.

Different flavors have been introduced in Asia, including: soft-shelled crab, grilled shrimp, seaweed, "blueberry and hazelnut", and "lemon and sesame". The grilled shrimp chips are pink in color, while seaweed is colored green.

Two limited-market flavors, cheeseburger and "Taco Night", were recalled in March 2010 as a safety precaution after Salmonella was found in a Basic Food Flavors plant which produces the flavor-enhancing hydrolyzed vegetable protein used in those flavors.

Marketing

Pringles is advertised in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland with the slogan "Once you pop, the fun don't stop" along with the original slogan "Once you pop, you can't stop".

The original Pringles television commercials were written, produced and directed by Thomas Scott Cadden (composer of the original Mr. Clean jingle) in 1968, while working at Tatham-Laird and Kudner Advertising Agency in Chicago.

Throughout its history, Pringles used its advertising campaigns to compare their products to conventional potato chips. In its early years, they were marketed as "Newfangled Potato Chips" and had a small silver pop-top to open the can. Unlike the current advertising, they only mentioned that, with their pop-top cans (which have been replaced with foil tops since the 1980s), their chips remain fresh and unbroken, the can holds as many chips as a bag, and their curvy shape allows them to be stackable; thus inspiring the slogan, "Other potato chips just don't stack up."

By the 1980s, the company launched the "Pringle Jingle", whose lyrics were "Once you taste the flavor ("It's a deep-fried taste!"), then you get the fever ("With a crispy crunch!"), then you've got the fever for the flavor of a Pringle!"

Starting in the 1990s and continuing today, Pringles has advertised their products by comparing them to bagged chips, which they view as greasy and broken. In each ad, a group of people are enjoying Pringles, while a lone person is enjoying a bag of generic potato chips (the bags themselves resemble either Lay's or Ruffles, depending on the Pringles variety marketed in the ad). They dump out some broken chips into their hand, only to find they are greasy, and end up wiping the grease all over their clothing.

Pringles Christmas tree in Spinningfields, Manchester in 2014

The Pringles logo is a stylized cartoon caricature of the head of a male figure (commonly known as "Julius Pringles") designed by Louis R. Dixon, with a large mustache and parted bangs (until 2001, the character had eyebrows and his bow tie framed the product name; in 1998, the bangs and lips were removed from the logo, and his head was widened a little).

Pringles, as a product brand, is especially known for its packaging, a tubular paperboard can with a foil-lined interior and a resealable plastic lid, which was invented by Fredric J. Baur. Baur (1918-2008) was an organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Cincinnati-based P&G. Baur's children honored his request to bury him in one of the cans by placing part of his cremated remains in a Pringles container in his grave.

In 2013 Lucasfilm and Pringles jointly commissioned crowdsourcing video studio Tongal for a commercial, with a total of $75,000 in prize money distributed to seven finalists.

See also

• Lay's Stax
• List of brand name snack foods
• Kryzpo
• Torengos

External links

• Are Pringles "real food"?